Very in Pieces (23 page)

“Because if not, just tell us now so we can be ready for it.”

“I said I'll be here.”

“Good,” I reply.

Ms. Staples claps her hands together. “Okay, class, back into the large group.”

Dominic drags his desk back to the other side of the circle, and I shift mine so I can't see him, but I can still feel his eyes on me.

iv.

I grab his arm in the hall after class once the crowd has dispersed.

“Very, hi, I wanted to talk to you, too.” His eyebrows are knitted together over his eyes.

“You can't just come back and insert yourself into my life.”

“I didn't insert myself, and anyway it's not your life. It's a school project.”

“Same thing,” I say. “I don't want to be in this group with you. I want you to leave me alone.”

“I'm sorry, Very. I don't know what to say. I was out of line yesterday.”

“You were,” I agree.

“You weren't exactly innocent.” He balls his hand into a fist and hits his own leg with it. “But I was way out of line. I do that sometimes, but I didn't want to do it to you.”

“Do what? Lie? Insult people?”

He looks away from me for a second, and I wonder if maybe I've pushed him back over that edge. I tense my body, but instead he says, “I'm going to make it up to you with this project. I'm going to make the most kick-ass presentation ever. It will blow your socks off, set you on fire.”

“You can't win me back through good grades.”

“Did I ever have you, Very?”

My heart hiccups and I feel sure I have just revealed a secret to both of us. “Just do the project and do it well, or deal with the wrath of Britta.”

“You don't have to worry. I might even dress up. I'll wear a dress, but don't be concerned, I won't come in with blackface or anything.”

“Gwendolyn Bennett's life story,” I say. “That's it.”

“Life story,” he agrees.

I leave him in the hall and make my way to my next class. “Hey, Very,” he calls after me. “I would take it all back if I could. Every word.”

But he can't. Once words are out there, they can't be recalled. Nonnie taught me that.

v.

“So what is going on with you and Dominic?” Britta asks. She has met me in the coffee shop at the hospital, where I'm visiting Nonnie again. Mom's up with her now, though neither of them was talking when I left.

The table between Britta and me has a dull green laminate top, and our mugs land with a clunk each time we put them down.

“Nothing. Not anymore.”

“What was going on, then?”

“I don't even know,” I say.

She wraps her hands around the mug.

“Where's Grace?” I ask.

“Studying Chinese with Josh. Listen, I've been asking around, and your reputation is still good. People were confused by the perceived sudden breakup with Christian. But it's all blowing over.”

“You've been doing approval-rating polls for me?” I ask.

“Just making sure no one's talking crap about you. You
know, hanging out with Dominic Meyers doesn't exactly—”

“I kissed him. At that party.” I lift my eyes to look at her face. “In the woods.”

“I'd heard you'd gone. You could have asked us to go with you.”

“I sort of tried when we were working on posters, and both you and Grace said it sounded awful.”

“But if you had really wanted to go, we would have—”

“I didn't want you to go with me,” I tell her.

“Because you were meeting Dominic.”

“Yeah. I guess.” I trace my finger along a crack in the tabletop that looks like a bird's footprint. “But something more. I just wanted something different.”

“Different friends?” She looks straight at me.

“Different me. Nonnie says you can write your own story.” I rub my head. “It didn't work out so well. For either of us.”

“Nonnie did all right for herself.”

“She's dying alone.”

“She has your family.”

“She has me.” I take a sip of the burned coffee. The taste lingers in the back of my throat. “Have you seen Ramona around school?” I ask.

Britta shakes her head. Her hair shakes around her shoulders.

“That's because she's not going. She skips practically every day, and my mother thinks that's just cool because Ramona's, like, too artistic for everyday rules. And my dad—my dad is otherwise occupied.”

“Jesus,” Britta says, letting the word slip out from between
her lips. “I didn't know.”

“I didn't tell you. God, this coffee is shitty. It's like because they have a captive market, they don't even try.”

“Sugar and cream, Very.”

The orderly who gave me the cigarette the other night comes in and orders a coffee. The woman working the counter juts her hip out and smiles at him—when she served us, I wondered if she even knew how to smile—and he laughs and leans on the counter. Lucky them.

“It hurts, you know,” Britta says. “I mean, not to add to your tossed salad of disaster, but that you're going through all of this without us, without me, it feels crappy.”

I shake my head. “I don't know what to say.”

“You're supposed to give me some line about not wanting to burden me with your troubles. Or maybe tell me that Dominic was a way to feel more alive.”

“And you'll say, ‘Yes, okay. Makes sense. I'll forgive you'?”

The orderly nods at me on the way out, and I nod back.

“Please tell me that he's not another distraction,” she says.

“He's my smoking buddy,” I say.

“Good one,” she says, but she doesn't smile. The fluorescent light above us flickers.

“I didn't want to burden you with my troubles. I didn't want to burden anyone. I didn't want to burden me by talking about them. And Dominic was, I don't know, an experiment.”

“An experiment?”

“Can I be friends with a guy like Dominic Meyers? And the
answer is no.”

“Because he's not like us.”

I look down into the shiny blackness of my coffee. “Something like that. I need to check back in with Nonnie. And finish that freaking artistic representation piece.”

“I really wish the experiment or whatever had ended before you agreed to do that. I like my nice shiny A in English. A Ms. Staples A is like being granted knighthood.”

“Sorry. I will try to make it as unsucky as possible.” We pick up our mugs and carry them to the busing station, where they join a slew of other half-drunk cups. They're just distractions, these mugs of coffee. Just a way to pass the time until the time is over.

Britta hugs me and her bag bangs against my leg. I pretend it didn't. It's one tiny thing, a way to let her know she's still my best friend.

i.

MONDAY, HE IS WAITING
for me after school. In my car. My previously locked car. I stand outside and just stare at him, his image crooked through the old glass. He stares back for a few moments and then leans over and opens my door for me. “Get in.”

“This is my car.”

“I know.”

“You can't order me to get into my own car.”

He sighs. “Would you please join me in your nice warm car?”

I frown but get in. “How did you get in here?”

“An old car like this is easy to break into. I had a cousin who taught me how to pick locks.”

“Are you kidding?”

“No.”

“Are you lying?”

He half shrugs. “Maybe about the cousin.”

“This is not helping your cause, you know. This is stalker-ish. If you're trying to make some sort of, some grand gesture, this is not it.”

“If you want me to leave I will. I just wanted to make sure I didn't miss you. Also, this is a nice car. Do you realize how nice this car is?”

“What are you doing here?”

“I want to apologize for how I treated you last week.”

“You already did.”

“But you haven't accepted.” He runs his hand through his hair and looks out the window. “Let's go somewhere.”

I should say no, but his suggestion surprises me. “Where?”

“I don't know. Ruby's.”

I wrinkle my nose. “I went there yesterday.” I'd stopped on the way home from the hospital since I knew there wouldn't be any food at home, and I couldn't stomach another meal in the hospital cafeteria. Plus it's open late. “What you get? Did you get a frappe?”

I shake my head. “Veggie burger.”

“Veggie burger? Who gets a veggie burger at Ruby's? Was it at least slathered in cheese and pickles?”

“I need to get home.”

“Come on, Very. I'm just asking for a chance to explain myself, and sitting here in your car, with people walking by—it's not the right place. We could go on campus somewhere, like
that sculpture garden—”

“That's for dates and prom pictures.”

He looks up at me through his flop of hair. “Fine. The beach, then.”

“It's October.”

“So no one else will be there. Let's go.”

I look in my rearview mirror, but I don't really expect to see Ramona. Surely she's cut school again. I shift my gaze forward, passing right over Dominic. A shaft of sunlight hits a tiny dent in the windshield and the light splits and sparkles around the car. “I need to go see my grandmother tonight.”

“Of course.”

“And I have lots of homework to do. You might have heard about this English presentation coming up.”

“English what now?” he asks. “Nah, I've got that done.”

“So I can only go for a little bit.”

“But you'll go?”

I look again at the dots of light and wonder how Nonnie might spin them into a poem, what they could represent for her. “I'll go.”

ii.

We drive in silence. I can feel him watching me, but I don't return his gaze.

I pull into the empty parking lot, right up to the wall along
the beach. We get out of the car and walk out to the sand. The wind is much stronger here than at school, and it whips across my face.

“I like the ocean in the fall,” he says. “It looks more serious.”

“It's just darker,” I explain. “It has to do with the angle of the earth.”

“Sometimes it's better not to have an explanation for everything.”

“I disagree.”

Our footsteps in the soft sand are erased almost as soon as we make them. I stare out at the breaking waves. It makes sense that people used to go to the ocean to convalesce.

“Let's sit for a while.”

Sitting on the cold, silky sand, I pull my legs up to my chest and count the waves, trying to see if they come in a pattern. Three right in a row, then a pause, then two. Nature is supposed to be full of patterns, but I can't find one in the ocean.

“Why'd you come to my house the other day?” he asks. A seagull slides into a landing in front of us, then waddles, fat, across the sand. Dominic throws a shell at it before it gets too close to us, and it flies a few feet away, barely lifting into the air. “Do you want me to say I'm sorry again?”

“No,” I say.

The seagull hops toward us and Dominic picks up another shell. “I want to explain why I acted the way I did. I know it wasn't right.” He throws the shell into the sand and it lands upright like it's marking a spot. “It's just that I like you. I didn't
realize that I would, but I do. I know I can be a real ass, and I like that you just come right back at me. And you can be funny in your own way. So I guess I thought, I don't know what I thought, but after we kissed, I didn't expect to come back to school and have you act like I was—like I was nothing. Like I was just some guy you cheated on your boyfriend with.”

“I broke up with him.”

“I know that now.”

“But I didn't break up with him for you.”

He picks up a handful of sand and lets it sift through his fingers. “That's fine. Really. It just sucks to feel the way I do and have you be with someone else.”

“So that makes it okay—the way you talked to me, I'm just supposed to forget it because you were jealous?”

“I don't know. That would be the best possible outcome.”

“For you.”

“Yes. For me. Still, I know it doesn't excuse the way I acted, and so I am sorry.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

I push my feet down against the sand, and watch it slip off like rats jumping ship.

“You said you were having a hard time. What's going on?”

The reasons are multiplying. Nonnie. Mom. Dad. Ramona. That day it had been Ramona. “Ramona's been cutting class. I don't know where she goes, but she just leaves school I guess. I don't know what's going on with her. I mean, I could talk to
some of her friends, but I don't know who they are anymore.”

“Your sister doesn't have any friends.”

“Of course she does.”

“Every time I see her, she's alone.”

I think about it. I don't see her often at school—probably because she isn't there often—but when I do, she is always by herself. And even though she used to bring friends over, she hasn't this year.

“When do you see her?”

“In the art studio sometimes. She started saying hi to me after that day you came to see me in the grocery store.”

“I didn't—”

“I'm just yanking your chain, Very. Anyway, sometimes she's there during lunch or her free periods. And she's always working, working, working. Like on this painting of the blanket. She doesn't really like to talk much. I tried. You Sayles-Woodruff girls have thick walls, you know.”

“Is that meant as a compliment?”

“What do you mean?”

“In all those songs the girls put up walls and only the singer is able to scale them. It makes her dark and mysterious, and him special.”

He picks up half of a blue-black mussel shell. “Your sister is dark and mysterious. Mysterious, anyway.”

I sigh. Even Dominic thinks Ramona is more interesting than I am.

“You just don't want to make the wrong choice. And I can
see how I might come across as a wrong choice.”

“Oh, you're wrong, all right. The wrongest of wrongs. Like, the radical of a negative wrong.”

“Isn't that imaginary?”

“Little
i
.”

“Didn't think I would catch that, did you?” He points at me with the mussel shell.

“You're full of surprises.”

“Layers on the onion, right?”

“But what do you get at the center of an onion? It's all just onion.” I pick up my own shell. A perfect small white one with a hole at the top, just the kind Ramona and I used to bring home to paint and then thread onto twine to make a necklace. “She must be going to see someone, right? Even if she doesn't have friends at school, she must have friends somewhere. Anyway, what am I supposed to do about it? She won't talk to me.”

A big gust of wind blows at us from the ocean, and I shiver. He stands up and helps me to my feet—his hands are warm, but I let them go. We start walking again down the beach. The sand swirls around our ankles.

There is no one else on the beach. The coast could break off and it would be just the two of us. He bends over and picks up a piece of sea glass. “Blue. That's rare,” he says.

“You can put it in your sculpture,” I say.

“What sculpture?”

“The one at my house.”

He shakes his head, looking confused.

“I thought . . .” I begin. “You didn't make it?”

“Honestly, I have no idea what you're talking about.”

iii.

“That's amazing,” he says. We've driven to my house so he can see the sculpture. “It's beautiful.”

“And you had nothing to do with it?”

“Very, I swear I didn't. I know you might not think I'm the most trustworthy person at this point, but really, I only wish I had made this.” He bends over and places the piece of sea glass in front of it. “Although, that would've been a little creepy.”

“That had occurred to me. Then again, you are the one who just let himself into my car.”

“I'm starting to realize that was a questionable decision.”

We are silent for a moment, watching the sculpture and its subtle shifts with the light and wind. The copper flowers beat like castanets while the bottle caps seem to undulate. The bird is sitting in its nest, hopping and flapping its wings to warn us off.

It's warmer here than at the beach, like the air up on this hill is resisting the change from summer to fall.

“Are you going to invite me in?” he asks.

“What are you, a vampire or something?”

“Maybe.” But he steps right into the house. He crosses the entryway and then pauses. I try to see the space through his eyes. The sunken living room seems dated, the bar cart comical. The
exposed beams don't make sense in the Frank Lloyd Wright–style architecture.

There are books, CDs, and records in every room of the house, and I know he'll want to see them all. He'll comment on them.
This book is okay, but this record is simplistic, and this short-story collection isn't worth the paper it is printed on
.

Still, I want to show him every room, every book, album, trinket. I want to pick them up and hand them to him. I want to tell him the stories behind them. I want to hear his pronouncements and see his lips move as he makes them.

“Let me show you around,” I say. When we step down into the living room, I notice that my mom is there. She reclines in her usual space on the sofa, drink in hand. Instead of reading, though, she has a dazed expression on her face. It takes her a moment to even notice that we're in the room. “Oh, hello,” she says, propping herself onto her elbows. “It's the butcher boy.”

“That's me,” Dominic says gamely. “Very was just showing me around.”

“Did you see the sculpture?”

“It's beautiful.”

“It is. I'm feeling a bit under the weather, so—”

“Right,” I say. Hastily grabbing his hand, I lead him out of the living room up three stairs and into the room we call the library, although just saying it makes me feel pretentious.

“My grandmother had the house built. It is kind of a joke. The house, I mean.”

“An expensive joke.”

The room is ringed with bookshelves. He crosses the room and begins to read the titles. His body twists to get a better look. He pulls one out: a thin paperback. “I'd think stuff like this would be hidden away in a bedroom somewhere.”

The cover shows a woman in a low-cut dress, reaching across a desk for a phone, a knife in her other hand. “Nonnie loves pulp novels.”

“Pulp novels and Moxie,” he says. “I guess everyone has layers and layers.”

“Some people more than others.”

It feels like there is a thin wire connecting us, and each step he takes coils us closer. I watch the way his fingers linger on the books, gentle and reverent.

Nonnie lurks in every corner. There is a leather armchair scuffed around the edges. On the reading table next to the chair is an ashtray black with stains. In the window is a paper snowflake that Ramona or I made for her. Probably Ramona.

“Let's go,” I say. “There's more to see.”

I show him the sunroom, full of lush greenery. The spider plants, bamboo, and ivy are healthy and thriving. Someone has been watering and trimming them, maybe even cooing their silly names at them. But Dad hasn't been around enough lately. Mom would never remember to consistently water them. It has to be Ramona.

We cross back through the living room. Mom has disappeared, perhaps up to her bedroom to sleep it off. He nods toward the first set of stairs. “What's up there?”

“My mother's studio.”

He starts to turn in that direction.

“We can't go up there. She doesn't like people to see her work until it's done.” So I show him the kitchen instead. He nods approvingly at the stove. “Nice. You know I never did make you that French toast.”

I look down, smile, blush.

Damn it.

He steps toward me and I back away. Right into the door, which swings open behind me. “We can go up this way.” I lead him up the stairs of the turret Ramona and I share. Once at the top, there is nowhere to go but into my bedroom.

iv.

My bedroom is easy to see from his perspective. Matching furniture set. Matching pillowcases and flouncy bed skirt, all in periwinkle blue. A doll and teddy bear on the bookshelf. It looks every bit the bedroom of a little girl, and the blush that started on my cheeks spreads down my neck. I straighten a pile of books on my desk.